parts, the better half, the humanizing and the softening element.  And it would be against the nature of things to suppose that the body, thus shorn and mutilated, can possess in itself the virtue and power of progress, reform, and elevation.  The link connecting the family with social and public life is detached, and so neither is en rapport, as it should be, with the other.  Reforms fail to find entrance into the family or to penetrate the domestic soil where alone they could take root, grow into the national mind, live, and be perpetuated.  Under such conditions the seeds of civilization refuse to germinate.  No real growth is possible in free and useful institutions, nor any permanent and healthy force in those great movements which elsewhere tend to uplift the masses and elevate mankind.  There may, it is true, be some advance, from time to time, in science and in material prosperity; but the social groundwork for the same is wanting, and the people surely relapse into the semi-barbarism forced upon them by an ordinance which is opposed to the best instincts of humanity.  Sustained progress becomes impossible.  Such is the outcome of an attempt to improve upon nature and banish woman, the help-meet of man, from the position assigned by God to her in the world.

[Sidenote:  Yet the veil necessary under existing circumstances.] At the same time I am not prepared to say that in view of the laxity of the conjugal relations inherent in the institutions of Islam some such social check as that of the veil (apart from the power to confine and castigate) is not needed for the repression of license and the maintenance of outward decency.  There is too much reason to apprehend that free social intercourse might otherwise be dangerous to morality under the code of Mohammed, and with the example before men and women of the early worthies of Islam.  So long as the sentiments and habits of the Moslem world remain as they are some remedial or preventive measure of the kind seems indispensable.  But the peculiarity of the Mussulman polity, as we have seen, is such that the sexual laws and institutions which call for restrictions of the kind as founded on the Koran are incapable of change; they must co-exist with the faith itself, and last while it lasts.  So long, then, as this polity prevails the depression of woman, as well as her exclusion from the social circle, must injure the health and vitality of the body politic, impair its purity and grace, paralyze vigor, retard progress in the direction of freedom, philanthropy, and moral elevation, and generally perpetuate the normal state of Mohammedan peoples, as one of semi-barbarism.

To recapitulate, we have seen: 

[Sidenote:  Recapitulation.] First. That Islam was propagated mainly by the sword.  With the tide of conquest the religion went forward; where conquest was arrested made no advance beyond; and at the withdrawal of the Moslem arms the faith also commonly retired.